Obama's Cult of Progressive 'Hope and Change' Comes Crashing Down

From Glenn Reynolds, at the New York Post, "Broken promises: O has dashed lefties’ hopes":

As the 2012 presidential campaign winds to a close — it’s mostly about Big Bird and binders, apparently — it’s hard to recall the heady days of 2008. But thinking back, things have really gone downhill.

Four years ago, remember, we were told that electing Barack Obama as president would bring about an unprecedented degree of racial healing, and usher in a postracial society to match our new postracial president.

Foreigners would love us — Arabs and Third-Worlders because he was black with an Arabic name; Europeans because he wasn’t George W. Bush.
Bush’s ginned up “War On Terror” would fade away, extrajudicial killings would stop, Guantanamo would close and there would be no more undeclared wars in foreign lands. Our diplomats would be respected, and the world would be our oyster.

At home, the hypercompetent Obama would review budgets line-by-line for waste, fight pork and cut the deficit in half by his first term. We’d have unprecedented government transparency, and a new, post-partisan political style in which rational argument would replace division and name-calling. The drug war would ease, and those nasty Bush-era warrantless wiretaps would cease.

Also, under the enlightened economic stewardship of the Obama administration, the economy would recover, unemployment would be held down and housing would recover.

Well, not so much....

Continue.

I think the expectations were a little high to begin with, but O's been pretty much fail all around.

Sin City as Neo-Noir; Or, the Aesthetics of Post-Alienation

(This is the fifth in our film noir series. Thanks to Ben, David, Ray, and Tim for their highly entertaining and insightful posts, and special thanks to Ben for getting USIH involved. See his original post for details on the film noir blogathon and the Film Noir Foundation.)

Unlike my colleagues, I am not dedicating my blogathon contribution to one of the noir classics. Instead, I will analyze the not-so-hidden meanings of a recent film that fits the neo-noir category, among other genres, in the typical postmodern fashion of mixing and mashing: Sin City, the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s neo-noir “Dark Horse Presents” comic series from the early 1990s (itself based loosely on a 1950s graphic novel series). Co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (with “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino), Sin City gives beautiful, digital form to an ugly urban dystopia (“Basin City”), with an all-star cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Benicio del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, and Elijah Wood, among others. Watch the trailer for a taste:




The Sin City plot, so far as one exists (among the three self-contained stories within the film), is not really worth summarizing here because it is immaterial to the meaning of the film. What is that meaning? At the most obvious level, the film is about the banality of violence. Shot mostly in black-and-white, which enhances the noir elements of the film, the only color consistently laid over the colorless screen is red. Blood red. There’s a lot of red because there’s a lot of blood. But despite of all the blood, despite all the violence, despite all the torture, there is no remorse. The viewer is not asked to feel bad for the people getting slaughtered. The viewer is not asked to feel anything. We’re meant to let the violence wash over us as we concentrate on the powerful if detached aesthetics of Basin City.

Sin City’s failure to garner an empathetic, much less sympathetic, audience was the crux of a host of ambivalent to negative reviews. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes disapprovingly:

The soporific vibe isn’t helped by the fact that “Sin City” has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don’t bear any resemblance to actual life: they don't have hearts (or brains), so there’s no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it’s hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who’s landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.

Acclaimed New York Times film critic A. O. Scott also wrote about Sin City in an essay linking it back (as well as Kung Fu Hustle) to the first film to effectively mix real people with cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which played explicitly on neo noir themes, right down to the 1930s Los Angeles setting. Scott writes:

But even if the technology is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently wonderful, its applications can be worrisome. It is curious that the new techniques are so often used in the service of parody and nostalgia… And the result is often that the old forms, as they are spiffed up and retrofitted, are also emptied out. Mr. Rodriguez, for example, has rendered a gorgeous world of silvery shadows that updates the expressionist cinematography of postwar noir without expressing very much at all. His city, with its tough guys and femmes fatales, feels uninhabited, and the social anxiety and psychological unease of the old film noirs has been digitally broomed away. Instead, "Sin City" offers sensation without feeling, death without grief, sin without guilt and, ultimately, novelty without surprise. Something is missing—something human.

Both Dargis and Scott are correct in the descriptive sense. But they seem to miss the larger point. The brilliance of Sin City—and it is brilliant—lies not in its ability to connect to its audience in some human capacity, but rather, in the ways that it reflects America circa 2005, desensitized to horror by its awful war in Iraq and revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib—torture sanctioned by the upper rungs of the chain of command. Silja J. A. Talvi overtly makes this link in an article she titles “Torture Fatigue,” where she quotes psychologist Bruce Levine: “When you become disconnected from your own alienation [from society], you become cut off from your humanity… You become numb to all kinds of atrocities.”

I think Levine is onto something with his “disconnected from your own alienation” phrase. As historian David Steigerwald argues, alienation is no longer a concept used to describe our current state. Instead, we’re collectively numb. It’s in this context that we need to situate Sin City. In contrast to mid-century film noir, when cynicism was meant to be felt as something, perhaps as a symptom of alienation, Sin City is utterly devoid of feeling. And rightly so. In his post on The Third Man, Ray poses a bifurcation between noir and liberalism, the former too despairing, the later at least offering a message of redemption, if not a naïve one rooted in a predictably happy ending. Sin City does not work along these lines. It represents a void, plain and simple.

Or take Tim’s contextual analysis of Touch of Evil. Tim writes:

I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period’s intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city’s messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative.

In contrast, Sin City is not a return of the repressed in this sense. Everything is out in the open, nothing bubbles out from under the surface, because there is nothing. Just violence. And beauty.

Nihilism wrapped in aesthetics is, of course, one of the historical characteristics of fascism. Another recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, a fictional account of Spartan resistance to the Persian Empire, has in fact been charged with expressing militaristic values approaching fascism. In his typically amusing yet overstated way, Slavoj Žižek argues against this liberal consensus grain. In an essay titled “The True Hollywood Left,” Žižek relates the Persian Army—multicultural, hedonist, with the latest in long-range weaponry—to U.S. imperialism. Conversely, he relates the disciplined Spartans to the resistance to American imperialism and advises the left to quit distrusting discipline as a means to an end.

But what makes Žižek’s essay on 300 more interesting, and relevant to a discussion of Sin City, is his political analysis of the film’s form. 300, like Sin City, is highly stylized digital unreality. Žižek writes:

What makes 300 notable is that, in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, that of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), a technically more developed art (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed one (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two arts in 300 is a failed one are thus wrong for the very reason of being right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the careen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.

Žižek’s conclusion is cryptic at best. But what I take him to mean is that westerners witness horror via the mediated unreality of modern, digital technologies. We don’t feel horror. Only our victims do. This is the “profound antagonism” of Sin City. This is the aesthetics of post-alienation.

Sin City as Neo-Noir; Or, the Aesthetics of Post-Alienation

(This is the fifth in our film noir series. Thanks to Ben, David, Ray, and Tim for their highly entertaining and insightful posts, and special thanks to Ben for getting USIH involved. See his original post for details on the film noir blogathon and the Film Noir Foundation.)

Unlike my colleagues, I am not dedicating my blogathon contribution to one of the noir classics. Instead, I will analyze the not-so-hidden meanings of a recent film that fits the neo-noir category, among other genres, in the typical postmodern fashion of mixing and mashing: Sin City, the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s neo-noir “Dark Horse Presents” comic series from the early 1990s (itself based loosely on a 1950s graphic novel series). Co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (with “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino), Sin City gives beautiful, digital form to an ugly urban dystopia (“Basin City”), with an all-star cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Benicio del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, and Elijah Wood, among others. Watch the trailer for a taste:




The Sin City plot, so far as one exists (among the three self-contained stories within the film), is not really worth summarizing here because it is immaterial to the meaning of the film. What is that meaning? At the most obvious level, the film is about the banality of violence. Shot mostly in black-and-white, which enhances the noir elements of the film, the only color consistently laid over the colorless screen is red. Blood red. There’s a lot of red because there’s a lot of blood. But despite of all the blood, despite all the violence, despite all the torture, there is no remorse. The viewer is not asked to feel bad for the people getting slaughtered. The viewer is not asked to feel anything. We’re meant to let the violence wash over us as we concentrate on the powerful if detached aesthetics of Basin City.

Sin City’s failure to garner an empathetic, much less sympathetic, audience was the crux of a host of ambivalent to negative reviews. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes disapprovingly:

The soporific vibe isn’t helped by the fact that “Sin City” has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don’t bear any resemblance to actual life: they don't have hearts (or brains), so there’s no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it’s hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who’s landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.

Acclaimed New York Times film critic A. O. Scott also wrote about Sin City in an essay linking it back (as well as Kung Fu Hustle) to the first film to effectively mix real people with cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which played explicitly on neo noir themes, right down to the 1930s Los Angeles setting. Scott writes:

But even if the technology is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently wonderful, its applications can be worrisome. It is curious that the new techniques are so often used in the service of parody and nostalgia… And the result is often that the old forms, as they are spiffed up and retrofitted, are also emptied out. Mr. Rodriguez, for example, has rendered a gorgeous world of silvery shadows that updates the expressionist cinematography of postwar noir without expressing very much at all. His city, with its tough guys and femmes fatales, feels uninhabited, and the social anxiety and psychological unease of the old film noirs has been digitally broomed away. Instead, "Sin City" offers sensation without feeling, death without grief, sin without guilt and, ultimately, novelty without surprise. Something is missing—something human.

Both Dargis and Scott are correct in the descriptive sense. But they seem to miss the larger point. The brilliance of Sin City—and it is brilliant—lies not in its ability to connect to its audience in some human capacity, but rather, in the ways that it reflects America circa 2005, desensitized to horror by its awful war in Iraq and revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib—torture sanctioned by the upper rungs of the chain of command. Silja J. A. Talvi overtly makes this link in an article she titles “Torture Fatigue,” where she quotes psychologist Bruce Levine: “When you become disconnected from your own alienation [from society], you become cut off from your humanity… You become numb to all kinds of atrocities.”

I think Levine is onto something with his “disconnected from your own alienation” phrase. As historian David Steigerwald argues, alienation is no longer a concept used to describe our current state. Instead, we’re collectively numb. It’s in this context that we need to situate Sin City. In contrast to mid-century film noir, when cynicism was meant to be felt as something, perhaps as a symptom of alienation, Sin City is utterly devoid of feeling. And rightly so. In his post on The Third Man, Ray poses a bifurcation between noir and liberalism, the former too despairing, the later at least offering a message of redemption, if not a naïve one rooted in a predictably happy ending. Sin City does not work along these lines. It represents a void, plain and simple.

Or take Tim’s contextual analysis of Touch of Evil. Tim writes:

I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period’s intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city’s messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative.

In contrast, Sin City is not a return of the repressed in this sense. Everything is out in the open, nothing bubbles out from under the surface, because there is nothing. Just violence. And beauty.

Nihilism wrapped in aesthetics is, of course, one of the historical characteristics of fascism. Another recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, a fictional account of Spartan resistance to the Persian Empire, has in fact been charged with expressing militaristic values approaching fascism. In his typically amusing yet overstated way, Slavoj Žižek argues against this liberal consensus grain. In an essay titled “The True Hollywood Left,” Žižek relates the Persian Army—multicultural, hedonist, with the latest in long-range weaponry—to U.S. imperialism. Conversely, he relates the disciplined Spartans to the resistance to American imperialism and advises the left to quit distrusting discipline as a means to an end.

But what makes Žižek’s essay on 300 more interesting, and relevant to a discussion of Sin City, is his political analysis of the film’s form. 300, like Sin City, is highly stylized digital unreality. Žižek writes:

What makes 300 notable is that, in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, that of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), a technically more developed art (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed one (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two arts in 300 is a failed one are thus wrong for the very reason of being right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the careen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.

Žižek’s conclusion is cryptic at best. But what I take him to mean is that westerners witness horror via the mediated unreality of modern, digital technologies. We don’t feel horror. Only our victims do. This is the “profound antagonism” of Sin City. This is the aesthetics of post-alienation.

When (or is it how) do numbers matter?

I am a historian and…I think I like numbers. Is that a confession or a contradiction? Lately, I have sought refuge in public opinion polls when trying to write about public morality. Numbers are comforting in this endeavor because the idea of public morality is so conflicted and hazardous. To put it simply, when I am curious how blocks of Americans attempt to make sense of BIG issues such as war, abortion, same-sex unions, spreading democracy, the role of God in the nation's history, etc., I turn to public opinion polls to help ground me in what I think is one kind of reality. However, as social scientists will point out, the polls that I depend on are little more than snapshots of discrete moments and unless I am ready to delve into data collection and regression analysis, I am doing little more than bolstering my own qualitative conclusions. And yet, numbers do matter. Would it not be irresponsible to disregard polls when writing about debates over, say, the Vietnam War or Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union?

When my colleague at USIH Mike O’Connor recently noted that 58% of Americans believe that God has granted America a special role in history, what are we to make of that number? It evokes, as Mike suggests, the larger idea of American exceptionalism—that Americans believe that the United States is special among contemporary nations. And yet, when I looked at polls from 2003-2008 regarding perceptions Americans had of their country, I found multiple snapshots that created an interesting composite picture.

For example, Daniel Yankovich pointed out in 2006 essay in Foreign Affairs, that Americans illustrated the self-awareness to acknowledge “that the rest of the world sees the United States in a negative light.” According to poll data that Yankovich collected and analyzed, many Americans understood that the United States was seen as “arrogant” (74 percent), “pampered and spoiled” (73 percent), a “bully” (63 percent), and a “country to be feared” (63 percent). However, this collective view did not undermine American opinion regarding a more abstract meaning of the nation itself, which many Americans continued to see in a positive light as a “free and democratic country” (81 percent), a “country of opportunity for everyone” (80 percent), and country generous to other people (72 percent) and a strong leader (69 percent).[1] Similar findings came through in international polls, such as the 2003 National Identity study from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP): while 40.7% of Americans polled agreed very strongly that the U.S. “is better than most other countries” (which ranked the United States first out of thirty-three countries), only 12.9% of Americans agreed very strong that the United States should follow its own interests, even if this leads to conflicts with other nations. [2]

We find interesting numbers in interesting times: when I looked at polls that dealt with the Iraq War, advancing democracy by war, and the approval rating of George W. Bush, it was all downhill from 2003-2007. During that same period, though, the public opinion of the military as an institution rose. Immediately after 9/11, Bush was wildly popular. As he left office he was dismally unpopular. Such numbers make sense in light of the events they reflect. But do they say something larger?

In other words, when do these numbers tell us something about the structure of public morality? If as Ronald Beiner explains about Kant’s idea of public morality, “our actions reflect our maxims, and our maxims are not reducible to natural impulses but instead are traceable to an ultimate (and inscrutable) ‘first ground,’” do our polls reflect our maxims?[3]

---

[1] Daniel Yankelovich, “The Tipping Points,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2006), accessed at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/20060501faessay85309/daniel-yankelovich/the-tipping-points.

[2] ISSP 2003, “National Identity,” accessed at: http://www.za.uni-koeln.de/data/en/issp/codebooks/ZA3910_cdb.pdf.

[3] Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 219.

When (or is it how) do numbers matter?

I am a historian and…I think I like numbers. Is that a confession or a contradiction? Lately, I have sought refuge in public opinion polls when trying to write about public morality. Numbers are comforting in this endeavor because the idea of public morality is so conflicted and hazardous. To put it simply, when I am curious how blocks of Americans attempt to make sense of BIG issues such as war, abortion, same-sex unions, spreading democracy, the role of God in the nation's history, etc., I turn to public opinion polls to help ground me in what I think is one kind of reality. However, as social scientists will point out, the polls that I depend on are little more than snapshots of discrete moments and unless I am ready to delve into data collection and regression analysis, I am doing little more than bolstering my own qualitative conclusions. And yet, numbers do matter. Would it not be irresponsible to disregard polls when writing about debates over, say, the Vietnam War or Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union?

When my colleague at USIH Mike O’Connor recently noted that 58% of Americans believe that God has granted America a special role in history, what are we to make of that number? It evokes, as Mike suggests, the larger idea of American exceptionalism—that Americans believe that the United States is special among contemporary nations. And yet, when I looked at polls from 2003-2008 regarding perceptions Americans had of their country, I found multiple snapshots that created an interesting composite picture.

For example, Daniel Yankovich pointed out in 2006 essay in Foreign Affairs, that Americans illustrated the self-awareness to acknowledge “that the rest of the world sees the United States in a negative light.” According to poll data that Yankovich collected and analyzed, many Americans understood that the United States was seen as “arrogant” (74 percent), “pampered and spoiled” (73 percent), a “bully” (63 percent), and a “country to be feared” (63 percent). However, this collective view did not undermine American opinion regarding a more abstract meaning of the nation itself, which many Americans continued to see in a positive light as a “free and democratic country” (81 percent), a “country of opportunity for everyone” (80 percent), and country generous to other people (72 percent) and a strong leader (69 percent).[1] Similar findings came through in international polls, such as the 2003 National Identity study from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP): while 40.7% of Americans polled agreed very strongly that the U.S. “is better than most other countries” (which ranked the United States first out of thirty-three countries), only 12.9% of Americans agreed very strong that the United States should follow its own interests, even if this leads to conflicts with other nations. [2]

We find interesting numbers in interesting times: when I looked at polls that dealt with the Iraq War, advancing democracy by war, and the approval rating of George W. Bush, it was all downhill from 2003-2007. During that same period, though, the public opinion of the military as an institution rose. Immediately after 9/11, Bush was wildly popular. As he left office he was dismally unpopular. Such numbers make sense in light of the events they reflect. But do they say something larger?

In other words, when do these numbers tell us something about the structure of public morality? If as Ronald Beiner explains about Kant’s idea of public morality, “our actions reflect our maxims, and our maxims are not reducible to natural impulses but instead are traceable to an ultimate (and inscrutable) ‘first ground,’” do our polls reflect our maxims?[3]

---

[1] Daniel Yankelovich, “The Tipping Points,” Foreign Affairs (May/June 2006), accessed at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/20060501faessay85309/daniel-yankelovich/the-tipping-points.

[2] ISSP 2003, “National Identity,” accessed at: http://www.za.uni-koeln.de/data/en/issp/codebooks/ZA3910_cdb.pdf.

[3] Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 219.

The Revenge of the Eustonians; or Benda It Like Berman

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a glowing assessment by Anthony Julius of Paul Berman's new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which angrily accuses Western left-wing intellectuals of embracing the Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan while failing to come to the defense of the Somali-Dutch refugee and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan, according to Berman, is a slippery character whose opposition to Islamic radicalism is more ambivalent than is often said; while Hirsi Ali is a brave secularist who has devoted her career to truly opposing Islamic extremism in the name of Enlightenment values. But Berman and Julius seem more interested in their opponents on the Western intellectual left, who, they argue, have betrayed their vocation and their intellectual heritage through (in Julius's words):

the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

For Julius, Berman's book is an impressive entry in a genre that includes Richard Wolin's Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and the many books devoted to Martin Heidegger's Nazism, works which call intellectuals to account for monstrous political failings. As Julius notes, the urtext of this genre is Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clerc (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) (1927), which attacked intellectuals who abandoned dispassionate reason in favor of nationalism, racism, and militarism.

"Berman," writes Julius, "has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them."

Berman's book has also been lavishly praised by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who had personally encouraged Berman to expand an already extensive 2007 New Republic piece attacking Tariq Ramadan.

What links Berman, Julius, and Rosenbaum, is that each is strongly connected to the self-described Decent Left that emerged following 9/11. And the elephant in the room of their discussion of left intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan is the Decent Left's signal project, the War on Iraq.

Paul Berman, in particular, has been an unusually committed and dogged proponent of that war, seeing it as the first necessary step in a long war against "Muslim totalitarianism."* Along with Berman, Anthony Julius was an early signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British document that excoriated the anti-war left and has been the chief institutional manifestation of the pro-war left in the UK.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, was ambivalent about the upcoming Iraq War in October 2002, but he knew what he didn't like--the anti-war movement. How dare leftist academics attack George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, Rosenbaum wrote, when they had yet to atone for the crimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

"I guess today," Rosenbaum concluded dramatically, "Left means never having to say you're sorry."

Say what you will about the Eustonian "leftists," they certainly seem to have adopted Rosenbaum's accusatory credo as their own when it comes to the Iraq War.

There have been many more appalling crimes in the last bloody century of the world's history, but in this young millennium, the War on Iraq stands as one of the greatest wastes of human life and national treasure. It helped destabilize a region. It ushered in new threats to civil liberties in two of the world's great democracies. It placed the United States in the company of the world's open torturers. And unlike Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocides, this one is our responsibility as Americans and Brits. And special responsibility lies with the war's unrepentant cheerleaders.

So while I don't have a studied opinion about Tariq Ramadan, I do know that Paul Berman, Anthony Julius, and Ron Rosenbaum are pretty much the last people who ought to be lecturing us about the trahison des clercs.**
________________________________________
* Berman's view of the war is on fine display in the Slate forum entitled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" (in Berman's case, not very much).

** For an alternate view on Tariq Ramadan, see this recent Andrew March piece from The American Prospect.

The Revenge of the Eustonians; or Benda It Like Berman

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a glowing assessment by Anthony Julius of Paul Berman's new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which angrily accuses Western left-wing intellectuals of embracing the Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan while failing to come to the defense of the Somali-Dutch refugee and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan, according to Berman, is a slippery character whose opposition to Islamic radicalism is more ambivalent than is often said; while Hirsi Ali is a brave secularist who has devoted her career to truly opposing Islamic extremism in the name of Enlightenment values. But Berman and Julius seem more interested in their opponents on the Western intellectual left, who, they argue, have betrayed their vocation and their intellectual heritage through (in Julius's words):

the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

For Julius, Berman's book is an impressive entry in a genre that includes Richard Wolin's Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and the many books devoted to Martin Heidegger's Nazism, works which call intellectuals to account for monstrous political failings. As Julius notes, the urtext of this genre is Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clerc (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) (1927), which attacked intellectuals who abandoned dispassionate reason in favor of nationalism, racism, and militarism.

"Berman," writes Julius, "has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them."

Berman's book has also been lavishly praised by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who had personally encouraged Berman to expand an already extensive 2007 New Republic piece attacking Tariq Ramadan.

What links Berman, Julius, and Rosenbaum, is that each is strongly connected to the self-described Decent Left that emerged following 9/11. And the elephant in the room of their discussion of left intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan is the Decent Left's signal project, the War on Iraq.

Paul Berman, in particular, has been an unusually committed and dogged proponent of that war, seeing it as the first necessary step in a long war against "Muslim totalitarianism."* Along with Berman, Anthony Julius was an early signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British document that excoriated the anti-war left and has been the chief institutional manifestation of the pro-war left in the UK.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, was ambivalent about the upcoming Iraq War in October 2002, but he knew what he didn't like--the anti-war movement. How dare leftist academics attack George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, Rosenbaum wrote, when they had yet to atone for the crimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

"I guess today," Rosenbaum concluded dramatically, "Left means never having to say you're sorry."

Say what you will about the Eustonian "leftists," they certainly seem to have adopted Rosenbaum's accusatory credo as their own when it comes to the Iraq War.

There have been many more appalling crimes in the last bloody century of the world's history, but in this young millennium, the War on Iraq stands as one of the greatest wastes of human life and national treasure. It helped destabilize a region. It ushered in new threats to civil liberties in two of the world's great democracies. It placed the United States in the company of the world's open torturers. And unlike Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocides, this one is our responsibility as Americans and Brits. And special responsibility lies with the war's unrepentant cheerleaders.

So while I don't have a studied opinion about Tariq Ramadan, I do know that Paul Berman, Anthony Julius, and Ron Rosenbaum are pretty much the last people who ought to be lecturing us about the trahison des clercs.**
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* Berman's view of the war is on fine display in the Slate forum entitled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" (in Berman's case, not very much).

** For an alternate view on Tariq Ramadan, see this recent Andrew March piece from The American Prospect.